Site Mobile Navigation

Ryanair, Scorned in Europe, Turns on the Charm

LONDON — Charging 60 euros, or $82, for carry-on bags deemed too large to go in the cabin.

Assessing a penalty of €70, or almost $100, for not checking in online.

Bombarding passengers who take a 6:15 a.m. plane with in-flight announcements hawking everything, including snacks, lottery tickets and smokeless cigarettes.

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the budget airline Ryanair, has vowed to address the criticisms that have made his carrier, Europe’s biggest and most profitable, its most reviled.

It is a change of heart motivated mainly by pragmatism. Even as Ryanair has added routes every few months, Europe’s weak economy has taken its toll, leading Mr. O’Leary to issue a warning on profits. Simply put, the company can no longer afford to risk losing customers who would rather pay more to fly on another carrier than endure Ryanair’s cattle-car approach to air travel.

He is perhaps best known for past proposals like onboard pay toilets, or standing-room “seats” at the back of the airline’s Boeing 737s, or charging higher fares to “fat people” — suggestions that never came to fruition but seemed carefully calibrated to offend.

Photo

Michael O’Leary, head of Ryanair.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Even recently, over coffee one morning, he puzzled aloud about the British news media squall that had followed his first live chat on Twitter the day before, as part of Ryanair’s effort to embrace social media — a communications form that Mr. O’Leary has long disdained.

During an hour of Twitter posts on Oct. 21 — which was followed by another a few days later — Mr. O’Leary gamely parried a volley of online curiosity and invective with a mix, mostly, of courtesy and quick wit. Yet he had been unable to resist an occasional inappropriate remark — as when he commented on the profile photo of a female questioner, with “Nice pic. Phwoaaarr!” To another poster’s sarcastic suggestion that Ryanair consider adding extra seats in the cargo hold, he replied: “Not seats but beds. Mile high club anyone?”

The coarser posts, said Mr. O’Leary — a married father of four young children — were “just to endear myself to all the feministas.”

“God bless them,” he said with a shrug, before quickly veering back on-message. “I think you have to separate the weirdo, cranky, pantomime publicity-generating hound that I am,” Mr. O’Leary said, sighing, “from what is a phenomenally successful airline delivering a phenomenal customer service.”

For many passengers, “phenomenal” and “customer service” might seldom travel in the same Ryanair cabin. The airline has been dogged for years by tales of travelers abandoned to their own devices whenever strikes, erupting volcanoes or foul weather have forced flight cancellations. Last month, Ryanair was pilloried in the British press for charging a doctor from Leicestershire 160 pounds, or nearly $260, to change his flight from Dublin to Birmingham after his entire family had died in a fire. (The airline subsequently decided to waive its fee policy in that case and refund the passenger.)

But for all the detractors, it would be hard for anyone to dispute Ryanair’s explosive growth — or the role that its ruthlessly cost-conscious business model has played in transforming Europe’s once-cossetted air travel market into one where airlines fiercely compete for every passenger.

The airline, founded in 1985 by the Irish billionaire Tony Ryan, has grown from flying 80,000 passengers a year on a single route — Dublin to London — to shuttling roughly 80 million annually among 180 destinations, on a network that extends from Estonia to the Canary Islands.

Photo

A Ryanair jet in Spain.Credit
Albert Gea/Reuters

That puts Ryanair well ahead of Europe’s next-largest airline by number of passengers, Lufthansa of Germany, which last year transported just over 64 million people.

Yet as Europe’s economic slump grinds on, even Ryanair is starting to feel the pinch of weakening travel demand. Simply promising low fares and punctual flights — the airline has a good record on both measures — is not enough. Last month the airline warned investors that net profit for its current financial year could fall below last year’s record €560 million ($773 million) as it scrambles to fill unsold seats. That would be the Ryanair’s first earnings decline in a decade.

And so, many analysts say, Mr. O’Leary must find ways to transform its brand to appeal to the millions of travelers who consciously avoid Ryanair.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“The history of the airline industry is littered with shuttered carriers that once led in their parts of the world, but took their eye off the ball, and part of that was taking their eye off the customer,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst for Hudson Crossing, a San Francisco consulting firm. “As the low-cost market matures in Europe, Michael O’Leary realizes that Ryanair has to think of ways to make customers prefer the airline.”

Ryanair’s new charm offensive includes giving airport staff and cabin crew more discretion in dealing with common issues like oversize carry-on luggage. It also plans, in coming months, to reduce the fees it charges to check a bag, among other reductions. And planes departing before 8 a.m. will now be designated “quiet flight” without those blaring sales pitches.

But the main thrust of the plan is digital. Elements include a redesign of its deliberately cumbersome website, which was designed to thwart online ticket resellers. The smartphone app is now free, instead of costing €3, or about $4, to download. And there is the embrace of Twitter.

“I’ve been incredibly, I suppose, dismissive of social media for the last four or five years,” Mr. O’Leary conceded. “I think so much time is wasted by so many people exchanging inanities on social websites. Yet, I am now persuaded in recent weeks and months that actually, use of sites like Twitter is a very good way to disseminate our message.”

Photo

Michael O’Leary said he would address criticism of Ryanair, the top carrier in Europe.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Analysts said Ryanair’s belated preoccupation with brand-burnishing comes as other carriers with better reputations — including global brands like Air France-KLM and British Airways — have begun to push more aggressively into niche markets.

“The whole low-cost space in Europe has become much more cramped,” said Craig Jenks, an independent airline consultant in New York, rattling off a list of competitors that included London-based easyJet; Air Berlin of Germany; Vueling in Spain; Wizz Air in Hungary; and Norwegian Air Shuttle.

It also comes as Ryanair finds itself struggling to find new sources of revenue.

Analysts say Mr. O’Leary has little choice but to find ways to increase average ticket prices, which would mean appealing to a higher-paying clientele.

“The more you can attract people who are prepared to pay a higher price, the better,” said Chris Tarry, an aviation consultant based in London. “The most price-insensitive traffic that has a need and will book late — by definition, that’s going to be business traffic.”

To that end, Mr. O’Leary said Ryanair was trying to identify extra services that business travelers would be willing to pay a premium for, like reserved seating and priority boarding.

Mr. O’Leary said he hoped a more proactive approach to public relations would help offset the impact of “the unrepresentative one in 100,000 sob stories” that make their way into the media. And he said he recognized the need for a subtler tone.

“Shouting and screaming is fine when you’re growing very rapidly and being the kind of challenger,” he said. “But we’re no longer the challenger brand. We’re now the establishment brand. And I think we need to evolve and be a bit more sophisticated in the way we communicate.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 29, 2013, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ryanair, Scorned in Europe, Turns On the Charm. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe